This one takes the Spacecake

I am now about mid-way through my stay in the City of Lights, and while everything has of course been magnificent and enchanting and eye opening, it has also been…expensive. So, in lieu of dining out every few nights or attempting to be creatively gourmet in my small dorm room with its shabby communal kitchen, there’s been a lot of yogurt with muesli. And pasta. Loads of pasta. So much pasta that I might have to abstain from it for a few months upon my return.

This means that I’m pathetically short on any entertaining dining-with-the-Frenchies stories. All I’ve got is me, often in sweats, standing over the stove watching a) my water boil, or b) my instant falafel mix slowly cook. This one is usually followed by me packing up the falafel to take back the room and mindlessly dumping hot oil into the sink, scaring the crap out of anyone in the kitchen and guaranteeing tiny oil burns on my hands.

Part of the reason my wallet is currently feuding with me however, is a very good reason. Its name is Amsterdam. And we recently spent four lovely, lovely days and three hazy nights together.

Yes, yes, Amsterdam. Land of weed and hookers and waffles and happy Dutch people with clogs and bikes. We’d all be fooling ourselves if I said we paid good money for a three hour train ride with no intention of sampling the famous local ganja. Consider it our out-of-country way of supporting the legalization of Mary Jane in good ol’ California.

Now, being a recent college grad, I may have had a few magical brownies in my time. So when the five of us waltzed up to a tiny coffee shop near the Red Light District, where we had been sent by a friendly waitress for the best edibles in the city, I was feeling confident of my ability to handle myself.

Fast forward a few hours, and I am face down in my hot chocolate. Whipped cream has just spurted out of my nose and I can’t move I’m laughing so hard.

Let’s back up.

We landed ourselves a table at The Speakeasy, tucked in between a restaurant and a sex shop, right alongside the canal. One of the girls, Jess, approached the guy behind the bar, intent on buying us four slices of this so-called Spacecake business we'd heard so much about, wolfing it, and heading back out into the rain-slicked streets for some sight-seeing.

After asking for four slices, a look of pure incredulity set into this guys face.

“Four??” he asked, holding up four fingers and looking past Jess to make sure he had understood these crazy-eyed Americans correctly.

“Yes?” Jess replied, confused.

“Four.”

“Yes.”

“No. Three.”

This lovely man soon explained that we were nuts for thinking we could handle that much Spacecake. Because there were five of us, he sold us three slices of something that looked like my mother’s zucchini bread and a little slip of paper with instructions. We were only to take a fifth at a time, separated by 45 minutes, then 2 hours and then 3 hours.

We nonchalantly accepted his instructions and divided the first little slice into fifths with my i.d. card. No biggie. It tasted like a dry piece of cake, nothing very sweet or weed-y. We hopped off our stools and sailed off into the streets.

The first 45 minutes passed pretty innocuously. None of us felt particularly stoned, and the hour of the second piece came quickly. The second little fifth tasted like I had just bit into a marijuana plant. During this period of a few hours, we proceeded to take a large handful of pictures (that none of us really recall taking) and bought obscene amounts of waffles—frosted and otherwise.

Here's a picture I don't remember taking. That guy knows what we've been into.

We also saw a double rainbow. I am near positive that we were the picture of non-smoothness, as all five of us stood in the middle of the sidewalk, eyes skyward, gasping and smiling like the glassy-eyed idiots we were.

After the hot chocolate incident that soon followed, the day of the Spacecake ends. All I know is we finished those suckers, for better or worse. And that next time, I will only order one.